LENHARTSVILLE PAINTER IS KNOWN AS A HEX OF A GUY * JOHNNY CLAYPOOLE MAY NOT BELIEVE IN MAGIC, BUT HIS SIGNS ARE KNOWN TO CHARM ADMIRERS.

RON DEVLIN, The Morning CallTHE MORNING CALL

Renowned hex sign painter Johnny Ott was gravely ill when he summoned his most promising student, Johnny Claypoole, to his bedside at Allentown's Hamilton Convalescent Home in 1964.

Ott, who died shortly thereafter of cancer at age 73, made a plea and a prophecy. "John, will you carry on my work?" the dying folk artist murmured to Claypoole. "If you do, it will be with you the rest of your life."

Claypoole, then a 43-year-old foundry worker, somewhat reluctantly accepted the mantle handed down by his mentor, known as the "Professor of Hexology." He had only taken a few lessons from Ott, who ran the Lenhartsville Hotel on Old Route 22. And Claypoole had to provide for his family by working a full-time job.

Making hex signs, the colorful Pennsylvania Dutch emblems that adorn barns throughout the Lehigh Valley, was to be merely a hobby -- not a life's calling. And certainly he couldn't derive his main source of income from painting.

Ott's prophecy, it turned out, came true.

Johnny Claypoole, encouraged by his wife, quit his job and went on to become world-known.

"He's the greatest," said fellow artist Bob Doney of Pen Argyl. "What he does is fantastic."

The colorful patterns of rosettes, tulips and distlefink birds painted in Claypoole's Lenhartsville studio have made their way to the Smithsonian Institution, the Man and His World Expo in Montreal and the western Pennsylvania home of golf great Arnold Palmer.

Claypoole was featured twice in "On the Road with Charles Kuralt." He appeared on the classic 1960s TV game show "To Tell the Truth," whose panel included actress Peggy Cass (she guessed Claypoole's profession). Frequently, he was a guest of Captain Noah, who hosted a classic children's show on Philadelphia's Channel 6.

Now semiretired, Claypoole chatted recently about a folk art career that spanned 35 years.

He's 78 and, despite some health problems, said he feels like he's 39.

Claypoole, a born storyteller, reveled in telling tales of hex signs warding off ghosts and exorcising evil spirits.

He emphasizes he's no believer, just a painter.

But he continues to be fascinated by people who believe in the hex sign's power to ward off evil and bring good luck.

Claypoole chuckled as he told of being approached at a New York craft show by a young couple who were unable to have children. Well-dressed and articulate, they had consulted doctors and tried to conceive for several years without success. "Would you paint us a fertility sign?" they asked.

Claypoole cautioned them not to build up their hopes. These were decorative signs, he said. They had no magic powers.

The couple persisted, and Claypoole painted a sign with the sun and rain -- symbols of fertility.

Several years later, he saw the couple again. Claypoole asked them, half seriously, if the fertility sign had worked.

"It sure did, we've had three kids," the man said, smiling. "If that thing doesn't stop working pretty soon, we'll have to get rid of it."

On another occasion, Claypoole recalled, a well-to-do businessman wanted a hex sign painted for a farmhouse he bought in rural New Jersey. Whispering, as if he feared someone would overhear him, the man told Claypoole the house was haunted.

A troublesome ghost, the man said, would turn on the television and the lights in the middle of the night. It would move things from one place to another.

"Just do any kind of sign you want," the desperate man pleaded. "And make it soon. This thing is driving us crazy."

Claypoole painted a mighty oak with a crucifix in the center.

A few weeks later, he said, the businessman called. "It worked, it worked!" he shouted.

An unlikely hex painter, Claypoole grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a printer. He came to Lenhartsville to visit a friend in the early 1950s and he liked the area so much that he stayed.

Claypoole's rotund stature and Abe Lincoln-style beard, though, gave him the look of a genuine Pennsylvania Dutch folk artist. With a black Amish hat, a blue denim work shirt and overalls, he looked as if he had come right off the farm.

For years, he traveled the craft show circuit in a Volkswagen bus. He painted hex signs on scores of barns in Berks and Lehigh counties.

He painted wooden boxes, kerosene cans, pitchers and milk jugs.

In the process, he was perfecting a technique that originated in Germany with fractur art --calligraphy that adorned birth certificates and family Bibles that began about the 16th century. Short-lived in Europe, it was brought to America by immigrants who settled primarily in Pennsylvania. Fractur art, first used to decorate trivets and tombstones, evolved into hex signs that give character to the region's barns.

Doney, who met Claypoole at the Kutztown Folk Festival, ranked him as perhaps the premier hex sign painter in America. His work reflects the most basic traditions of American art, suggested Doney, a retired artist who taught at Northampton Community College.

Kuralt, who traveled the country's highways and byways documenting Americana, was fascinated with Claypoole's Irish hex.

It had a shamrock in its center, adorned with distlefink and tulips. A leprechaun sat beneath the shamrock, with a pot o' gold at the end of a rainbow.

"Boy, did I ever sell signs after that show appeared on national television," Claypoole recalled. "It really put me on the map."

He got an offer from Hollywood. And some "shady characters" from New York, who pulled up to his studio in a black Lincoln, offered him $100,000 a year to come to Manhattan and paint signs exclusively for them under a 10-year contract.

Claypoole turned them down. His artistic inspiration -- rooted in the farm region around Lenhartsville, where he and his wife raised seven children -- was worth more than money.

"I like to be myself," he said, standing at a workbench covered with baby food jars full of paint.

He was inspired by his Irish wife, the late Helen Mary Hagerty Claypoole, and he used shamrocks and leprechauns in good luck hex signs. She was a West Philadelphia girl, and he brought her to his farm in Lenhartsville after they married. She inspired him for 45 years, until her death several years ago.

"The Irish are the greatest," he said.

Perhaps because of his wife's Catholicism, Claypoole's signs often have religious overtones.

"The Trinity Tulips" sign, for example, features tulips as a sign of faith. The "Calico Star" has a purple center representing the robe of Christ, with a white background for purity.

Claypoole's "Jewish Star of David" hex features a menorah in the center of the six-pointed star, surrounded by doves, hearts and tulips. It stands for peace and happiness, good luck and good health, he said.

His "Tree of Life" hex originated from a design on a broken dish sent to him by a man in Austria, who asked that it be duplicated.

Gradually, he's turning over the studio to his son Eric.

Yet, the urge to paint still lurks in the old artist's soul.

"I never dreamed I'd be an artist, but I fell in love with it," he said. "Old painters never die, they just paint away."